Emails from the so-called “Twitter Files” — internal communications shared with Lee Fang at The Intercept as well as other journalists following Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media platform — reveal that the company had knowledge of a U.S. military-linked information operation and did not publicly acknowledge the operation or provide transparency to the general public after the operation was discovered.
That appears to be a clear violation of Twitter’s principles about state-backed information operations as laid out by Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth in 2019. Indeed, Twitter made a point of disclosing the details of accounts, and the content of their tweets, when they were identified as part of government linked information operations, beginning in 2018.
Roth wrote, in a statement of principles that is still published on Twitter’s website:
We believe Twitter has a responsibility to protect the integrity of the public conversation — including through the timely disclosure of information about attempts to manipulate Twitter to influence elections and other civic conversations by foreign or domestic state-backed entities. We believe the public and research community are better informed by transparency.
Fang, in his article published on Tuesday, details how Twitter “whitelisted” — a function that provided accounts with invulnerability to Twitter’s detection mechanisms that might decrease visibility for accounts engaged in spam or abuse — a list of accounts provided by U.S. Central Command in 2017. The accounts engaged in activities including: touting the accuracy of drone strikes in Yemen, promoting U.S. backed militias in Syria, and spreading anti-Iran messages in Iraq.
An official working at CENTCOM promised that the accounts would be labeled as “USG-attributed, Arabic-language accounts tweeting on relevant security issues,” but many of the accounts subsequently deleted these disclosures and concealed their affiliation with the U.S. government after Twitter granted them the special status.
Over the years, some of these accounts have been deleted while others, such as this one, according to Fang, continue to operate without any disclosure of their U.S. government affiliation.
Fang, citing internal Twitter emails, found multiple instances in which Twitter senior executives appear to have been aware that the government linked accounts were still operational and, in at least some cases, acting in violation of the company's rules on platform manipulation.
Any further uncertainty, as well as concerns about potential embarrassment from a U.S. government linked information operation on Twitter, should have come to a head last August when the Stanford Internet Observatory published a report showing strong evidence that CENTCOM was involved in the creation and operation of a series of undisclosed government-linked accounts. “…[E]mails obtained by The Intercept show that the creation of at least one of these accounts was directly affiliated with the Pentagon,” reports Fang.
But even after the SIO report made a splash in the media, Twitter never disclosed the CENTCOM-led information operation on its page dedicated to disclosing state-linked information operations on the social media platform. For that matter, while highlighting state-linked information operations from Russia, Iran, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Spain, China, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Ghana, Nigeria, Serbia, Honduras, Indonesia, Turkey, Thailand, Cuba, Armenia, and Tanzania, no U.S. government linked information operations have been publicly disclosed by Twitter.
Roth, the former head of trust and safety, did not respond to questions about why the U.S. government linked accounts were never publicly disclosed, even after researchers from Stanford appear to have outed at least one of the accounts that Twitter knew was an undisclosed CENTCOM linked account.
Ray Serrato, a former member of Twitter’s safety and integrity team, told Responsible Statecraft that “this activity was disclosed to research partners — such as SIO and Graphika, whose research was covered by the media, under the criteria set out in public blog post here,” providing a link to a blog post explaining how outside researchers were provided datasets including “platform manipulation campaigns originating from the Americas, Asia, Asia Pacific (APAC), Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (EMEA), and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).”
Serrato did not respond to questions about why Twitter, despite disclosing data about “this activity” to research partners, did not add the CENTCOM linked accounts to Twitter’s list of disclosed state-linked information operations.
Twitter, under Musk’s new ownership, doesn’t seem to have taken any more meaningful steps to address the U.S. government linked platform manipulation. No U.S. government linked operation has been added to Twitter’s list of government sponsored influence operations and, as Fang noted, at least one of the accounts linked to CENTCOM, while providing no disclosure of its U.S. government ties, is still active. Oddly, the new management appears to be following the pattern set by previous executives: sharing information about the influence operation with outside sources but not officially acknowledging the U.S. government led influence operation, taking steps to shut it down, or disclosing the extent or substance of the platform manipulation.
Musk, for his part, is under pressure to generate profits from Twitter after buying the company for $44 billion and may be increasingly dependent on his more profitable ventures, such as SpaceX, in order to service the debt on his Twitter acquisition. That could put Musk in the uncomfortable position of deciding whether to disclose U.S. government sponsored influence operations on Twitter when the U.S. government is one of the biggestclients for SpaceX. While the “Twitter Files” disclosed an uncomfortable chummy relationship between Twitter executives and CENTCOM officials, it remains unclear how Twitter’s new ownership intends to address ongoing U.S. government influence operations on the platform and how it will respond to Defense Department requests for special treatment going forward.
Twitter did not respond to questions about whether they will suspend accounts linked to the CENTCOM influence operation or publicly disclose the U.S. government’s role in platform manipulation in the same manner that foreign government-linked influence operations have been disclosed by the company.
Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and Investigative Journalist at Large at Responsible Statecraft. He reports on money in politics and U.S. foreign policy.
(Shutterstock/rvlsoft)|Editorial credit: Ink Drop / Shutterstock.com
This article is the latest installment in our Quincy Institute/Responsible Statecraft project series highlighting the writing and reporting of U.S. military veterans. Click here for more information.
America’s post-9/11 conflicts have left indelible imprints on our society and our military. In some cases, these changes were so gradual that few noticed the change, except as snapshots in time.
This is the case with the “Cult of Special Operations Forces (SOF)” that has emerged since 2001, first within the military, and then with society through mass media including popular autobiographies and movies ranging from “Black Hawk Down,” “Lone Survivor” “American Sniper,” “SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden” and many, many others. The Cult has metastasized to many broader cultural accoutrements (video games, fashion, veteran culture, etc.).
As with other situations where we see friends proceeding down an untenable path together, America’s relationship with its special operators requires an intervention.
First, to my SOF colleagues past and present, it’s not you…it’s us. Well, it’s mostly us — but a little bit you, too. This is not a screed against SOF; I am an old SOF tribal member, and I have many friends and family members within the community. Our SOF troops are an incredible resource for the country — they are almost invariably brave, patriotic, fit, and spectacularly competent. Regardless of our differing policy views, we should be proud of their professionalism and their many tactical accomplishments over recent decades.
What I am about to say will no doubt anger some of my SOF friends — but mainly because they’ll know that I’m right. In the coming years, we will require an institutional and psychological reset of relations between America and her special operators. The elitism and secrecy of the current “Cult of SOF” is bad for the military, bad for society, and — ultimately — bad for the operators themselves.
SOF and "Big Army"
Until relatively recently, the U.S. military had a problematic relationship with its special forces. The Vietnam experience soured many in the conventional military on the special operators, whom they saw as ill-disciplined and overrated. Others argued that concentrating superior troops and leaders in single units denied the rest of the force the leavening effect that those soldiers could have added to regular formations.
Despite the skepticism of senior leaders, however, SOF expanded on an ad hoc basis in the years following Vietnam, until its tenuous position with the Pentagon changed with the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which established an overarching Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and strengthened the position of SOF within the defense structure.
The institutional strength of SOF relative to their conventional cousins was subsequently turbocharged by the 9/11 attacks and their leading role in the ensuing Forever Wars.
Today’s operators enjoy a privileged and inverted relationship with their parent services. SOF is now a caste apart, dominating the upper ranks of the military and monopolizing media and cultural attention. The “quiet professionals” many originally envisaged now have a media machine unrivaled across the military. Today’s SOF often treat the conventional military as the minor leagues from which they can selectively draw new talent. This distinction impacts the morale of conventional forces, even if few are prepared to publicly discuss it.
This stratification has impacts beyond hurt feelings, however. Separate chains of command and separate lines of effort can sometimes undermine what should be unified campaign plans. SOF theory begins with the proposition that specially selected and trained small units can have a vastly disproportionate battlefield impact, and this has often been the case. Sometimes, however, conventional units and scarce air assets have had to drastically intervene to pull SOF forces out of untenable situations of their own making, as happened in Mogadishu, and Operation ANACONDA, and elsewhere.
SOF and Society
America’s worship of its special operators raises uncomfortable questions about who fights America’s wars and how that affects U.S. policy.
For the better part of two centuries, America’s “special sauce” was its ability to raise effective mass forces in wartime. The U.S. ground forces that crushed the Axis represented a large number of (reasonably) well-trained, highly mobile, and lavishly supplied conventional forces, backed by massive firepower and embedded within a joint force capable of asserting and lethally exploiting U.S. dominance of the air and sea (dominance that were themselves products of mass mobilization).
These quality conventional units were by doctrine and design reliant on ordinary conscripts and volunteers. Even elite ground units of World War II, like our five airborne and six marine divisions, were tough but basically accessible to most troops, and, by extension, to the average American. By definition, however, not everyone can be SOF — a hard reality that raises difficult questions about who actually fights today’s wars.
It is a question that policymakers are in no hurry to explore, though. Small and insular SOF units provide a dysfunctional policy community with a lethal, capable, and discrete instrument that they can quietly employ with little political cost. Casualties stay within a self-selecting and narrow segment of society. Policymakers can wage war with minimal impact on broader American society and, all too often, they have little incentive to embed SOF efforts within a viable political strategy. Put simply, SOF can and does offer political leaders easy answers to complicated problems.
That being said, much of SOF’s vaunted secrecy is largely illusory: host country nationals and adversaries soon know that they are there and usually their activities are open secrets within the U.S. With each operation, it is worth asking whether SOF’s secrecy is designed to shield their activities from the enemy or from the American public and our various oversight mechanisms.
The Cult of SOF's Negative Impact on SOF
Even among the operators themselves, adulation can breed arrogance and a lack of accountability.
Most SOF troops will admit to sometimes seeing absurd episodes of indiscipline and favoritism that would have been crushed in even the most anodyne conventional unit, but which are quietly tolerated or overlooked in the fraternity culture of some SOF elements.
Most innocently, this entails quietly covering for illustrious senior troops whose bodies can no longer take the staggering demands SOF life. In other cases, it can give way to more insidious and even criminal conduct. The case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher may be the best known entry in SOF’s pantheon of misconduct, but is hardly alone. In 2017, a group of SEALS and Marine operators killed an Army Green Beret in a sickening hazing incident in Mali and followed it with a bizarre and shocking apparent ex parte effort to intercede with the soldier’s widow.
This followed a 2012 episode also in Mali, others in Iraq and Afghanistan, another in Erbil, and incident after incident elsewhere. In many cases, the troops involved have faced relatively light consequences for their actions, if, indeed, they faced any at all. To their credit, some SOF leaders themselves have openly addressed the repeated breaches of basic disciplinary standards.
Clearly, at least some SOF felt the strain of multiple combat deployments over the last 20 years. At the same time, however, we can also surmise that the command climate of some units was undermined by the ability to mask problems behind a shroud of public adulation, secrecy, and elitism.
A Warning From History
"When a nation reawakens, its finest sons are prepared to give their lives for its liberation. When empires are threatened with collapse, they are prepared to sacrifice their non-commissioned officers."
SOF are tremendously skilled and dedicated professionals and America is fortunate to have such troops. At the same time, though, SOF’s place within the broader military and society needs a reset.
Congress and executive branch officials should strengthen oversight of SOF and sharply question whether extravagant demands for secrecy are justified (from whom are we really concealing our hand?) Policymakers should ensure that when SOF is needed, their actions are synchronized with other kinetic and non-kinetic measures and embedded with a broader diplomatic and political strategy. SOF can be an exquisite tool, but they are not a stand alone policy.
The Special Operators themselves currently recognize that discipline and standards within their community need reinforcement. They can also ensure their training highlights their role within a broader force and ensure that the military as a whole is also recognized where appropriate. The fact that even an excellent film like “Black Hawk Down” barely mentions the 10th Mountain Division troops who incurred significant casualties while rescuing Task Force Ranger in Mogadishu should have incurred institutional pushback from the Army technical advisors and, frankly, from the SOF participants themselves.
More broadly, as we enter a different strategic setting from the 20-year war on terror, military commanders should seriously reconsider how SOF will be employed in a new mission set and what types of command relationships will this setting entail. We should note that SOF played a crucial role in the 1989 invasion of Panama and the 1991 Persian Gulf War — two of our more successful military endeavors of the postwar era — but they did so firmly ensconced within, and subordinated to, the larger conventional task force.
At the end of the day, though, redressing the imbalance will be difficult: the Cult of SOF has a long pedigree. An obsession with elite and specialized forces is a phenomenon observed in late-stage empires from Byzantium, with its Varangian mercenaries, through mid-20th century France with its Paras and Legionnaires, all immortalized in Jean Larteguy’s novels.
It is the unfortunate affectation of a restless and decadent society that is in constant conflict overseas, but whose own disaffected citizens feel little obligation to defend their country or to view their wars as anything other than spectator sports.
The public worship of today’s military is, in many ways, a political and emotional tithe that obscures the reality that the American public has outsourced its wars to a small and self-contained subset of society. SOF are simply the apogee of this phenomenon.
Through little fault of the operators themselves, they sit at the pinnacle of a warped religion only slightly of their own making.
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Top photo credit: President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Shutterstock/ Mustafa Kirazli) and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Salty View/Shutterstock)
As the distribution of power shifts in the region, with Iran losing relative power and Israel and Turkey emerging on top, an intensified rivalry between Tel Aviv and Ankara is not a question of if, but how. It is not a question of whether they choose the rivalry, but how they choose to react to it: through confrontation or peaceful management.
As I describe in Treacherous Alliance, a similar situation emerged after the end of the Cold War: The collapse of the Soviet Union dramatically changed the global distribution of power, and the defeat of Saddam's Iraq in the Persian Gulf War reshuffled the regional geopolitical deck. A nascent bipolar regional structure took shape with Iran and Israel emerging as the two main powers with no effective buffer between them (since Iraq had been defeated). The Israelis acted on this first, inverting the strategy that had guided them for the previous decades: The Doctrine of the Periphery. According to this doctrine, Israel would build alliances with the non-Arab states in its periphery (Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia) to balance the Arab powers in its vicinity (Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, respectively).
But after 1991, there were no Arab states left that could pose a conventional military threat to Israel. Israel’s focus, as a result, shifted to Iran. The new threat to Israel, Israeli decision-makers decided, was no longer the Arab vicinity, but rather the Persian Periphery.
What was odd, of course, was that Iran's hostility toward Israel throughout the 1980s, was not seen by Israel as decisive, as its focus was on Iraq and the Arab states. In fact, throughout the Khomeini era, Israel sought to reestablish relations with Iran and despite getting rebuffed by the clerical regime, Israel lobbied Washington to talk to Iran, sell arms to Iran, and not pay attention to Iran's anti-Israel rhetoric because it wasn't reflective of Tehran's real policies.
Iran was at first taken by surprise by the Israeli shift. At the time, its revolutionary zeal was fast declining, and the Rafsanjani government was desperately seeking to establish better relations with the US to gain access to investments and economic opportunities. It offered the US access to Iranian oil fields and sought to participate in the major conferences aimed at establishing the region's geopolitical order. But Iran was rebuffed by Washington and excluded from the Madrid conference.
Instead, Israel convinced Washington that for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, the U.S. needed to neutralize the new threat Israel was facing —- Iran's Islamic fundamentalism — by sanctioning and isolating Iran. As Martin Indyk told me, the more peace could be established between Israel and the Palestinians, the more isolated Iran would become. The more isolated Iran was, the more peace there could be between the Israelis and Arabs.
This is when the real Israeli-Iranian rivalry begins. Tehran responded by targeting what it viewed as the weakest link in the Israeli-American strategy to isolate Iran: The Oslo process. If the peace process was sabotaged, none of the other objectives of the US and Israel could be achieved. It was at this moment that Iran seriously began to support rejectionist Palestinian groups (its relations with Hamas remained fraught for a few more years, till Sheikh Yassin was assassinated by Israel in 2004).
The logic of this strategic rivalry has guided both states for the past three decades: Israel has sought to isolate and sanction Iran, prevent U.S.-Iran diplomacy, kill any potential U.S.-Iran deal, and push the U.S. to go to war with Iran. Tehran has challenged Israel on every front, armed and trained anti-Israel groups, and grudgingly sought to escape the isolation Israel has successfully imposed on Iran by striking a deal with the U.S.
Israel has scored several major victories: Iran's Axis of Resistance is largely shattered, and Israel is on the verge of establishing sustained air dominance over Iran. It may not succeed in doing this, but it has dramatically moved its position forward. Israel is on the offensive; Iran is on the defensive.
Even though this rivalry is far from being over, and Israel is far from being the clear victor, it has already started glancing toward the next state that needs to be subjugated in order for Israel to achieve military hegemony in the Middle East: Turkey. (Israel's doctrine is to achieve security not through balance, but through domination).
Turkey's victory in Syria pushes it deeper into Israel's focus. But Turkey is different from Iran: It is a member of NATO and the G20, its economy cannot easily be sanctioned, it is a Sunni power with stronger soft power in the broader Middle East than Shia Iran has enjoyed for the past 10-15 years. Turkey, of course, has several vulnerabilities as well, including the Kurdish separatist movement.
But as long as Israel believes its security can only come through militarily dominating all its neighbors that can pose a challenge to it — that is, those who have the capacity to do so regardless of whether they have the intent or not — then Turkey's emergence as a major power in the region will put it into Israel's crosshairs, whether it likes it or not.
The forces of geopolitics cannot be eliminated. They can at best only be tamed.
President Trump’s new National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) on Cuba, announced on June 30, reaffirms the policy of sanctions and hostility he articulated at the start of his first term in office. In fact, the new NSPM is almost identical to the old one.
The policy’s stated purpose is to “improve human rights, encourage the rule of law, foster free markets and free enterprise, and promote democracy” by restricting financial flows to the Cuban government. It reaffirms Trump’s support for the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, which explicitly requires regime change — that Cuba become a multiparty democracy with a free market economy (among other conditions) before the U.S. embargo will be lifted.
The policy outlined in the NSPM has yet to be translated into legally binding regulations, so it’s too early to tell if restrictions on U.S. trade or travel to Cuba will tighten. But the bottom line is that Trump’s new Cuba policy is not “new” at all. It’s just the latest variation on the embargo imposed on Cuba in 1962. For the next 63 years, Washington has tried to bend the Cuban government to its will by crippling the Cuban economy, all to no avail. Cuba today is no closer to being a capitalist multiparty democracy than it was in 1962 or 1996.
As we argue in a recent Quincy Institute brief, U.S. policy toward Cuba needs a major reset, a shift toward a policy of pragmatic engagement — not as a favor to the Cuban government, but because engagement better serves the interests of the United States and the Cuban people.
Advancing U.S. interests sometimes requires setting aside old animosities and engaging with former adversaries, as President Trump has done with Syria, Russia, China, and others. The president defines his “America First” foreign policy as one that champions “core American interests” and “puts America and its interests first.” U.S. policy toward Cuba in recent years has failed that test. Sanctions have increased the risks to U.S. national security on issues that the president has identified as U.S. priorities for the Western Hemisphere: migration, narcotics trafficking, access to strategic minerals, and the rising influence of China and Russia.
Conditions in Cuba today are far different than when President Trump issued his first NSPM in 2017, so U.S. Cuba policy needs to be reconsidered. Cuba is experiencing an unprecedented economic and social crisis rooted in the government’s mismanagement of the economy, the impact of the COVID pandemic, and crippling U.S. economic sanctions. Cubans are enduring shortages of all basic necessities, deteriorating government services, and repeated electrical blackouts.
As a result. the crisis has produced the largest emigration in Cuban history—nearly a million people in the past three years, 75% of whom have come to the United States.
Cuban society is also undergoing profound social change. The legalization of private enterprises has given rise to a dynamic private sector despite restrictive government regulations. The expansion of internet access and social media has led to a more robust civil society despite government censure and intimidation.
Cuba’s crisis is rapidly raising the costs to the United States of sanctions policy by stimulating migration, opening the door to geopolitical rivals China and Russia, blocking U.S. access to Cuba’s strategic minerals, hurting U.S. relations with allies, and threatening cooperation with Cuba on issues of mutual interest, including counter-narcotics cooperation.
As internal processes of change evolve in Cuba, disengagement leaves the United States on the sidelines, unable to exercise any positive influence on the trajectory of that change.
The United States needs to take the initiative to reset U.S.-Cuban relations to safeguard U.S. interests and ease the suffering of the Cuban people. The immediate goals of a new policy should be to:
Relieve migration pressures by making immediate regulatory changes that would aid the recovery of the Cuban economy and encourage the growth of the Cuban private sector, which is among the NSPM’s stated aims. The Cuban private sector is real and growing, forming the cornerstone of a revitalized economy and civil society despite operating in an increasingly hostile business environment.
Its success is critical to the Cuban people and the Cuban economy. U.S. sanctions add another layer of obstacles for it to overcome. Tangible support requires relaxing, not tightening, restrictions on U.S. trade, investment, and financial transactions, especially with the private sector. Taken together, these measures would significantly reduce migration pressures.
Expand commercial and cultural engagement to compete with the influence of China and Russia. The United States is a natural economic partner for Cuba — a potential source of trade, tourism, and investment far beyond what Russia or China can offer. Moreover, a robust economic relationship with the United States would give Cuba an incentive to limit its military and intelligence cooperation with U.S. adversaries.
In addition, Cubans have far greater cultural affinity with the United States than with Russia or China, a comparative advantage that should be built upon by loosening, not tightening, restrictions on cultural and educational exchanges, and travel.
Reengage with the Cuban government diplomatically to advance cooperation on issues of mutual interest, reduce bilateral tensions, and address human rights and property issues. Engagement facilitates cooperation and opens diplomatic channels in hopes of finding common ground. Making unilateral demands of Cuba on contentious issues has never produced results, whereas engagement has led to successful cooperation on counter-narcotics operations, migration, and environmental protection, among other issues.
The United States should continue to voice its support for basic human rights and condemn the Cuban government when it violates them. However, demanding Cuban concessions on human rights as a precondition for improving bilateral relations has never worked. No U.S. policy can force the Cuban government to adhere to high standards of human rights, but engagement creates incentives for the Cuban government to be responsive to Washington’s concerns.
***
A policy of engagement needs to be grounded in realistic expectations. It will not erase the fundamental differences between the United States and Cuba, and it is not an alternative path to regime change.
The pace and extent of this engagement ultimately depend on the Cuban government’s interest in improving relations. But the initial steps recommended here are ones the United States can and should take unilaterally, because they advance U.S. policy interests and offer the opportunity to set U.S.-Cuban relations on a better path for the future.
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